The discounts for HE - students and academics - used to be better than the general education discounts. I think it’s necessary to register with Unidays to get the Apple HE discount - see the Apple Education website, where I am sure the procedure and requirements will be described.
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Both my daughters are undergraduates at two different UK universities. Both use MacBooks without any issues.
(Well, none that I’ve heard of, which only means none that required intervention from the Bank of Dad!)
Both managed to get bursaries by looking around - one because she’s doing engineering, the other because she’s diagnosed autistic. There’s a surprising amount of money available from various sources, it’s finding out about them that can be tricky bit.
Mark
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Yes this is right. Basically the proof that you get asked for by Unidays is an email account at a University together with the associated password - that’s all. Last time I looked at the Apple education website, the discounts weren’t huge, but were big enough that I bought my MacBook Pro that way. No discounts on iPhones though!
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They ask for the email account password?! That’s ridiculous if they really do.
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They do because it allows them to check that you do actually own that email address. It isn’t much of a security issue because universities all use 2FA these days.
Anyway that is what they do.
I think Unidays passes the pair of credentials to the relevant university which confirms whether or not there is a match. It takes a few seconds. Once you have been approved that way, Unidays keeps the approval token which is valid for some time (weeks, months?) and makes it available to accredited suppliers, like Apple. So you get your Unidays registration, use it to go to the Apple education website and they have everything priced accordingly.
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Still sounds like a cack-handed way of doing things. Why not just send a verification email, after all you would have to have entered the password to get to see a verification email in the first place. 2FA or not, I’m not giving my passwords out to anybody
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Another vote for the MacBook Air. It’s probably the best all round computer you can buy at the moment. For someone who needs to carry it about quite a bit (like a student), weight and size is a big factor. Also, raw power is not an issue any longer for any normal use. She will get many years of use long after she graduates.
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I have a Mac book air and it is great.
Just about to get our son one for uni.
Offer of £120 off on apple website at the mo.
Regards,
Nick
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Well you are making me wonder about whether they use the emailed response approach, but trying to log into Unidays just now, using my email address and a unidays password, the “prove you aren’t a robot” captcha isn’t working. So maybe they have a Crowdstrike-originated outage currently. I’ll try again tomorrow!
Ok I did log into Unidays ok now, but of course I don’t know how they prove that I’m still eligible because they just went ahead and let me in. And then so did Apple. Anyway the MacBook Air 13 “ M2 is £899, the 13” M3 is £999 and the 15” M3 is £1199 in the Apple UK education store under their special university 2024 offer (that’s each one is £100 discounted).
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An alternate option would be to get a Laptop that runs Linux.
Then use LibreOffice for the Word processor, etc.
Very easy to use, you can still use it whilst it updates, the programs take up very little space compared to MS products.
Just another option to consider.
DG…
In some ways the actual machine is less important. More important may be the software required to undertake the classes on the course. Obviously the Uni itself can give advice here. Based on what the OP has said so far there may not be anything too specific or onerous. I would also make sure that where there is a need to import/export documents/files/data the software can do so accurately. Whilst there are products such as Libre Office and Google Workspace I have found that Microsoft 365 gives best coverage (at least for the tasks I undertake). There are good educational discounts for Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 works on both Windows and MacOS and also has mobile/phone/tablet capability if that is required/wanted.
Just interested…will microsoft 365 export a .doc document for example as a pdf file?
Still seems rather odd as it’s telling students to break a cardinal rule of online security by sharing a password with a 3rd party.
It would be more logical if students could sign up to Unidays directly from their University account web pages, and allow the University to pre-authenticate the application rather than sharing the password. Maybe this is more hassle for the universities/colleges and they leave it to their ’trusted’ partner.
I’m sure it’s all quite safe just seems an odd way of doing it.
Good information to know for the future though.
Credentials are not necessarily uid / pwd, it can also be something which identifies them uniquely.
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I may be misremembering the process as it’s a few years since I signed up to Unidays.
But in various circumstances, for example accessing journals to which the University has a subscription, you get passed to a University authentication service, sign in and are then passed back to the publisher. Maybe it’s like that now with Unidays.
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If you use Amazon they often have heavily discounted Microsoft 365 packages every few months, at least for the family packs. I don’t particularly like Office, especially the new cloud based stuff we have for work, but it is really so widely used it’s hard to go wrong with it.
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Thank you, I was not looking for microsoft 365 for myself.
I avoid microsoft as far as possible, and also not keen on the “in the cloud” way of working. I was curious if 365 was able to export a pdf file.
I have found that Atlantis Word Processor is as good as ms word for almost everything, certainly for most common word processing tasks, and the most obvious omission is tracking changes, which I suggest is unlikely to apply to students, most used in a corporate setting when someone wants to point the finger at a change someone has made that is disapproved. Additionally, I usually work with .rtf documents (rich text documents) which gives most compatibility with other word processing, and avoids the propitiatory incompatible elements that plague microsoft products. The ability to output a pdf file allows reading on almost every platform - portable document file. Unfortunately Atlantis lacks this featturs, but there are cheap of free products that will allow a .rtf file to save as a .pdf file.